I would never have believed that François Gravel, a cheerful writer and master of literary banter, would make me think about a subject as heavy as death. However, this is the exercise he imposes on me by publishing Take death as it comes (Druide, 2024, 258 pages), a collection of comments, often amused, about the Reaper.
I should have known it was coming though. Gravel, in fact, is not just a fanatic of the pen. For six years, he has published books in which gravity combines with humor to understand the dark side of reality.
In The little girl at the top of the stairs (Québec America, 2018), he recounted his difficult relationship with a mother who was not made to have children. In At your command, Colonel Parkinson! (Québec America, 2019), he revealed that he was struggling with this insidious disease. In The second glass (Druide, 2022), finally, he spoke of the ravages of alcoholism in his family. The clown does not lack lucidity.
Gravel, today, is 72 years old and lives with the constraints imposed on him by the aforementioned unfortunate colonel. He is aware of being in the last third of his life. From there came the idea “of composing short texts around the theme of death, trying to be light like an autumn leaf carried by the wind”.
Dying, he admits, is boring, but it’s life, so let’s go for it. To anyone who asks him where he is going with his macabre stories, Gravel already knows what to answer: “In the same place as you, reader. In the same place as you. ” Indeed.
Philosophers have given much thought to the question. It is often said that Epicurus would have solved the problem by affirming that death is nothing for us for the following reason: if we are alive, it is not there and if it is there, we are no longer there for the knowledge. In other words, then, there is nothing there.
I will be allowed, like Luc Ferry in his Philosophy lovers dictionary (Plon, 2018), to doubt “that this ridiculous sophism has succeeded in convincing anyone not to fear death” and to think, like André Comte-Sponville in Against fear (Albin Michel, 2019), that if “Epicurus is right to say that death is nothing to the dead, [il a] wrong to add that it is nothing for the living. For we know that we will die; But this knowledge is not nothing.”
Gravel shares this point of view. If philosophers “had found something enlightening [à propos de la mort] for two thousand years, it would have been known outside their circles,” he writes. He will at least agree, I imagine, with Comte-Sponville in saying “that the relationship to death, for each person, [est] less a matter of doctrine than of temperament.”
In matters of doctrine, Gravel knows where he stands: materialist in the philosophical sense of the term, he says he believes “neither in the soul nor in God, even less in paradise and hell”. He also enjoys refuting dubious beliefs, such as that according to which the soul weighs 21 grams and that describing death as a passage through a luminous tunnel. Anything, he sums up.
In terms of temperament, Gravel does not shy away from death. We know him as mischievous, inventive and sensitive; it remains so. Hay, he says, priests, philosophers and even writers! To imagine death, to say it and tell it, Gravel prefers songwriters, Ferré and Brel, for example, but especially Brassens, the master of the genre.
By explaining his inclination towards the brilliant author of Gravedigger, Gravel draws, in hollow, his own portrait. “His comments on death are never distressing, dramatic or grandiloquent,” he writes about Brassens. No great metaphysical reflections in him, no more than outpourings – that’s not in his nature – but shovelfuls of tenderness and humor. »
To describe Gravel’s work, I couldn’t have found a better one. The writer, like the singer, is funny, but not stupid. He does not look down on death, but refuses to let it win during his lifetime. Through his literary fantasies – comments on the last words of writers, criticism of insignificant modern funeral rituals, facetious examination of conscience – he tries to thwart death for as long as possible by playing with it, while knowing that it is ‘approach.
“She’s there, behind the door. I’ve known it forever. […] I try as best I can not to attract his attention. She’s there, I know, but I’m in no hurry to open up to her. In the meantime, I have old man activities, carefully chosen so as not to make noise. »
Even if he thinks about death more and more often, François Gravel is still very much alive, my friends, and I rejoice in that.
Columnist (Presence Info, Game), essayist and poet, Louis Cornellier teaches literature at college.